Saturday, July 28, 2012

This weekend, New Yorkers have a rare opportunity to see Vertigo the way Alfred Hitchcock intended—in 35mm IB Technicolor, with its original soundtrack. The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria will be screening a print from the film's 1958 first run, just as they had done in the summer of 1996, a few months prior to the premiere of the much-heraleded and much-hyped "restoration" by Robert Harris and James Katz which deservedly caused a stir because of their decision to scrap Hitchcock's original sound mix and create all-new sound effects tracks so that they could incorporate the stereo tracks of Bernard Herrmann's score that had been uncovered during their search for original production elements to assist in their restoration. They dodged, and danced, and put on a bit of a dog and pony show, in defense of their decision, but in spite of the fact that the decison may still haunt them, Universal never fully came down on the side of definitively righting the wrong by Harris and Katz by making certain that all future video releases include at least the option of selecting Hitchcock's original sound mix. Is the difference that apparent you ask?

Here's what I wrote about it after seeing the "restoration" of Vertigo at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York in October 1996 and then a month later in Los Angeles:

A
Very Different "Slice of Cake"

Restoring
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

"Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of
cake," said Alfred Hitchcock to the French critic-turned-director François
Truffaut. What Hitchcock meant was that in his view, he was an entertainer - he
could still tell stories of significance, but his objective was never to be
dull or "downbeat." Hitchcock occasionally set aside commercial
considerations to reveal a more personal side of his art.

Such was the case with his 1958 masterpiece Vertigo, which
in a new 70mm presentation was a featured attraction of the 34th New York Film
Festival in October 1996. The anticipation of Universal's re-release—of a
motion picture that has been widely available to television, revival houses and
home video since its re-issue in 1983—was due to the fact that it was to be
fully restored by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, the noted film doctors
responsible for saving and restoring such classics as Spartacus, Lawrence of
Arabia and My Fair Lady.

Vertigo was a very different slice of cake from the previous
films Alfred Hitchcock made with James Stewart and Paramount Pictures. The
difference was in the film's tone, and its lack of a "Hollywood"
ending. In the 1950s, audiences had come to expect a high level of excitement,
wit, and sophistication from a Hitchcock movie. Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and The Man Who Knew Too Much, all scripted by John Michael Hayes (who also wrote
the director's The Trouble with Harry), had conditioned audiences to light
comic thrillers, each presented in widescreen and Technicolor (the latter three
in VistaVision, Paramount's widescreen process which produced a larger and
sharper negative by running the 35mm film horizontally through the camera
rather than vertically). The director's first production after his four-film
collaboration with Hayes was The Wrong Man, made for Warner Brothers in black
and white, with a dark and gloomy script based on actual events. The picture
failed at the box-office.

When Hitchcock returned to Paramount to make Vertigo,
advance publicity boasted a return to Technicolor and VistaVision, and a
tried-and-true Hitchcock star, James Stewart. How could they go wrong? What
Hitchcock and the studio had not reckoned, was that his lighter features and
enormously popular television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, left audiences
unprepared for the emotional realism and deeply personal statement Hitchcock
made in Vertigo.

The combined talents which came together on Vertigo include
stellar performances from the film's stars James Stewart and Kim Novak, a
sensitive and moving score by Bernard Herrmann, and the subtle lighting and
exquisite camera movement of Hitchcock's cinematographer, Robert Burks. Also
noteworthy are Edith Head's costumes, Henry Bumstead's production design, George
Tomasini's magnificent editing, and one of the most honest, revealing and
mature scripts Hitchcock ever worked with, written by Alec Coppel and Samuel
Taylor.

In a sense, Vertigo has been undergoing a
"restoration" since the end of its first theatrical run. Not a
restoration to a deteriorating negative, but of the high regard that even
Hitchcock had for the film. The original ads for Vertigo, designed by Saul Bass
and approved by Hitchcock, were rather vague, yet boldly included the words
"Alfred Hitchcock's Masterpiece." After the picture failed to meet
its commercial expectations, the studio publicity department replaced the Saul
Bass ads with more of a "hard sell" approach. The following week, the
box-office receipts had again risen, but faltered not long after. Vertigo made
a small profit, but Hitchcock was always disappointed that the film he chose to
sell as his "masterpiece" was not embraced by audiences.

Today, Vertigo makes its perennial appearance on various top
ten lists; was among the first twenty-five films chosen for the National Film
Registry in America in 1989; and has had its second major reissue since the
director's death in 1980 - not bad for a picture that was largely dismissed
nearly forty years ago. That, of course, is a testament of Alfred Hitchcock's
genius as an artist, entertainer and pop-culture icon.

Vertigo's reputation has improved with age. The ad promoting
the restoration and new 70mm presentation is the original Saul Bass design
which Hitchcock approved. The physical restoration of the VistaVision negative,
and the restoration of the film's prominence in cinema history would appear, at
last, to have been complete.

As I sat in New York's Ziegfeld Theater on the first day of
the commercial run of the “restored” Vertigo, I could not help but put myself
in the place of John "Scottie" Ferguson, the obsessed detective
played by James Stewart. For through the course of the narrative, Scottie is
subjected to an impostor, for the Madeleine he falls in love with is not really
Madeleine at all, but rather, as the second half of the film reveals, Judy
Barton. Having first heard the soft, tortured whispers of Madeleine, it was
easy for Scottie to fall in love. When Scottie first meets Judy as Judy, his
ears are subjected to her somewhat harsh, nasal voice, as she utters such
phrasings as "What do you want?" and "Go on, beat it." The
reason I felt like Scottie was that the film I was hearing was not Vertigo, but
rather a poor imitation. (Shortly after seeing the “restoration” in New York, I
viewed it at the Avco Westwood Theater in Los Angeles and noted and reconfirmed
those differences.)

Robert Harris and James Katz are to be commended for their
painstaking effort. However, after looking forward to the presentation of the “restored”
print for sometime, I am saddened to say that the effort was disappointing. The
presentation at the Ziegfeld opened with a filmed introduction by Martin
Scorsese, who went on to extol the virtues of Vertigo, the genius of Alfred
Hitchcock and the importance and urgency of film preservation and restoration.
Scorsese has long been a champion of film preservation and has been responsible
for much interest in the rediscovery of both underrated classics as well as
highly regarded films such as Vertigo. In the restored print following the
Universal logo, the original Paramount Release and VistaVision logos have been
restored to the film—both had been absent from the prints and videos of the
film since Universal released the picture in 1983.

The main title sequence, designed by Saul Bass and
accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's brilliant score, was in excellent condition.
There was only one noticeably torn frame in the print, during the scene where
Scottie asks Judy to change the color of her hair. And except for the flashback
sequence where Judy (Kim Novak) recalls her climb to the tower where Gavin
Elster (Tom Helmore) waits with the body of his wife, the negative seems to be
in fine shape. That sequence in the “restored” version (as it does in the 1983
prints and video release—albeit less so) stood out from the rest of the picture
for its graininess. The timing of the print in New York was also uneven. In
particular, the finale, where Scottie brings Judy back to the scene of the
crime, was printed much too dark. It is one of the greatest sequences in the
Hitchcock canon and much of its impact was lost due to the fact that the actors
were difficult to see. The timing of the Los Angeles print was much better.

Visually, the 70mm print is stunning. Where the “restored” version
fails however, is in the new sound mix. The texture, tone, and level of many of
the film's sound effects and in some instances, dialogue passages, have been
degraded for the sake of utilizing a digitized recording of Bernard Herrmann's
original score. Employing foley artists to create whole new sound effects
tracks, the restorers claim in the press kit for the release to have utilized
the pages and pages of Hitchcock's personal sound notes, however Harris and
Katz have rather boldly second guessed Alfred Hitchcock (and an Academy Award
Nominated sound crew). Instead of trying to recreate the sound effects as
closely as possible to the original film, the “restoration” uses additional
sound effects which were never there to begin with, and in a few instances
sound effects have been omitted.

These differences may seem minor to the casual viewer.
However, to someone familiar with the film, from the very first gun shot of the
opening sequence to the ringing of the tower bell in the finale, the
differences are jarringly apparent. These variations from the original work go
beyond the scope of what a restoration should be.

The level of each newly created footstep, the rustling of
papers, and the automobile sounds appeared too hot throughout the picture.
Perhaps I am being too critical of the mix, feeling that the sound effects were
not at all subtle—almost as if the foley artists wanted to call attention to
their work—but one cannot be too critical of the creation of effects that were
never there before, especially since the restorers had the original film to
guide them.

At a single viewing of the “restored” Vertigo, I noted the
following major differences—during the scene where Madeleine jumps into San
Francisco Bay, the original picture does not contain sounds of seagulls,
however the 'restoration' does. The day after Scottie saved Madeleine from the
bay, he follows her in his car as she drives back to his house. At one moment a
car can be seen pulling into the street on the right side of the frame. In the
original film, the sound of a car horn accompanies this point of view shot, and
is absent in the “restoration.” Later in the same sequence, Scottie makes a
gesture to engage the hand-brake as he parks his car, and the accompanying
sound effect is no longer there. At the end of the nightmare sequence,
Herrmann's cue on original track fades out as the scene dissolves from the
closeup of Scottie to an exterior shot of the sanitarium. The “restored” mix
left in an additional odd musical note over the latter shot, which clearly had
been faded out in the original mix. Later, when Scottie returns Judy to the
Empire Hotel following their first date, the original picture does NOT have the
sound of the parking brake, and the "restored" version DOES. In the scene in
Ransohoff's, where Scottie gives a saleswoman specific instructions as to the
clothes he wishes to buy for Judy, the "restoration" now includes the familiar
chime of department store elevators, whereas the original soundtrack does not.
When Scottie is waiting for Judy to return from the beauty salon, he stands in
the doorway to hotel room, and in the original picture there is the sound of
the elevator door sliding open and then Judy appears. In the “restored”
version, the sliding elevator door is replaced with a bell sounding the arrival
of the elevator. Finally, as Scottie and Judy arrive at San Juan Batista for
the finale, a rather loud ambient effect of crickets is now on the track where
it hadn't been before. So much for an Academy Award Nominated sound track.

The issue has been debated and the restorers have defended
their work on various internet discussion lists, where they claimed "the
new sound was based upon the original mono mix which is heard on the 35mm
optical 1958 prints AND... the magnetic combined m&e (music and effects
track)..." which "contains more information than the optical
track." It would seem that the new sound should only have been "based
upon" the original track of the 1958 prints—after all, was that not the
version that was among the first twenty-five films selected for the National
Film Registry in 1989?

Audiences in 1958 got to see Vertigo printed in IB
Technicolor. The color process in which colored dyes—yellow, cyan and magenta—are
actually placed on the film. The beauty of true Technicolor is obvious to
anyone fortunate enough to see a screening of an archival print in a revival
house or museum. During their Hitchcock retrospective last spring, the American
Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, screened an original 35mm IB Technicolor
print of Vertigo. The print, while suffering some signs of its age (1958), was
quite beautiful to see. There were colors and subtleties that I had never seen
before in any of the 1983 release prints.

Harris and Katz went to great pains to locate original
costumes and paint chips from antique cars in order the match the look intended
by the original filmmakers. The purpose of this seems more a means of showing
off. IB Technicolor prints of Vertigo are in existence. These original prints
would have served as the best guide to match the colors and sound. The green
dress worn by Kim Novak does look a certain way in reality, but that is not
necessarily the shade of green that it might appear in Technicolor. All the restorers
really needed to do was look at the original film as printed in Technicolor,
and sequence by sequence, scene by scene, they had same palette from which
Hitchcock created the look of Vertigo. Aside from some printing problems, which
were corrected in the print I saw in Los Angeles, the restorers have done an
admirable job pictorially. James Katz was also quoted in the September/October
Films in Review as stating that subsequent 35mm prints may be printed in IB
Technicolor. Imagine new 35mm IB-Technicolor prints of Vertigo with the
original sound track—now that would truly be a restoration.

----------------

A few years after the "restoration" I spoke at a screening of Rear Window held at the Museum of the Moving Image. That film had also been restored by Harris and Katz, who by this time had the good sense not to tamper with the soundtrack. So with that said, get yourselves to the Museum of the Moving Image this weekend as Vertigo will be screened in its original glory and beauty on Saturday and Sunday at 6:00 PM. And if you're able to make it to the screening in Astoria, I hope you will come and join me as I mark Hitchcock's 113th at Barnes & Noble in Union Square on August 13 @ 7:00 PM.